It has been just a week since I’m back in Italy. To celebrate the first anniversary of my sister’s wedding, we take a trip to Isola Bella, one of the several islands that float softly on the slow green waters of Lake Maggiore, a large lake located on the south side of the Alps.
We returned to Italy to flee the highly stressful and frightening lockdown, in which Shanghai is still stuck, and it’s unclear when it will get rid of it. The last couple of months has been months of closure. Looking at the world from my window, hundreds of tall apartment towers and various construction sites down there at street level with containers used as dormitories for construction workers.
After so many difficulties, we managed to return here to Italy. As I was saying, after only a few days, I found myself immersed in an environment that was a planet away from China. The sun was burning at almost 35 degrees. Tourists in slippers waved fans on and off the ferries around the lake, floating among the bluish-green mountains. The relaxing breeze caresses you in the small wooden ferry, sliding on the flat water among palaces, villas and piers hiding among those dense Lombard woods.
Isola Bella looks like a vessel in a vision, a sailing ship from mythical eras that have met giants and gods, heroes and monsters in a long-forgotten past.
Now, tired and aged, the island no longer wants to raise the sails but allows with benevolence to be tackled by tiny multicoloured ants in the shape of sun-burned tourists who yell at each other while running after some kids.
Who were the Borromeo? They were nobles, popes and eventually also saints. They have been bankers, lawyers, writers and even doctors. They were sometimes allies and sometimes enemies of kings and queens. They have been philanthropists, patrons, art lovers, and war practitioners. They fight with the pen, the sword, and the coin.
A family that existed before the Renaissance played a vital role in the history of Italy. It took Napoleon to dismantle their various fiefdoms, but the Borromeos still retained their properties today.
Why am I saying this? Because after three years of not returning to Italy for the first outdoor tour we make, I found myself within beauty, softness, and nature.
While observing those Borromean Islands, the sun’s reflections jump nervously on the lake water while white boats and wooden ferries slowly float. My thoughts move back to Shanghai. A grey, angular, cold Shanghai. A Shanghai in which modern architecture, made of pure, slick and aseptic surfaces is the only noticeable aesthetic language you can find, where even the post-modern, with its crude attempt to soften and make the style more human, has produced nothing enjoyable to the eye.
The new Pudong seems like a group of glass buildings starting to feel outdated, facing the old English stone buildings in front of them, which looks eternal on the contrary.
True! Everybody is watching the new Pudong area, the symbol of the Chinese miracle, I was amazed too, and still I’m.
But here, on this island, I feel clear how the age of the machine has not managed to give a human soul to its language and ideology.
The moderns were against the aristocracy, wanted to overthrow and erase it, and did it with good reason.
But the places that the old nobility and the old religions have built over time have survived and today remind us that there have been, and still there are, other ways of living, other ways of existing.
In China, sometimes I feel they took too seriously the myriad slogans shouted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, they’re left with only the architecture of the machines. So much so that human beings start to feel redundant.
Yet how much tradition, knowledge, and culture has been created in millennia of Chinese history? This massive amount of past clashing, mixing and blending with unbelievable modernity was why I dreamed of travelling to China.
But this tolerance towards different eras, ideas, cultures and ways of life was already here.
